I'm 5'11", put my height into two of the online calculators, and both spat out roughly the same pair of numbers. Seated feels fine. Standing at 108 cm I hunch within about ten minutes and my shoulders creep up, which is exactly what I bought a standing desk to avoid. Do these calculators account for anything other than total height, and what did you end up at compared to what you were told?
The two things calculators reliably miss are your shoes and your keyboard. Measure standing elbow height in whatever you actually wear at that desk, then subtract the thickness of your keyboard — a chunky mechanical with the feet up can easily be three centimetres from desk surface to the home row, and that's the entire error you're describing. The desk surface should sit low enough that the keys, not the desk, are at elbow height. Do the same for the monitor: top of the screen near eye level, roughly an arm's length away, and no calculator knows how tall your monitor stand is.
The keyboard thickness point cost me about two months of wrist grumbling. Flattened the keyboard feet, dropped the desk two centimetres, problem gone. The feet on keyboards are there for typists on typewriters, not for us.
Worth checking whether it's actually the desk. Hunching within ten minutes of standing is at least as often a monitor height problem — when you stand, your eye level rises by however much taller you are standing than sitting, and if the monitor doesn't rise with you, you drop your head and round your shoulders and then blame the desk. Raise the screen for the standing position, or get an arm so it follows you, and re-test the same desk height before you touch anything else.
This was mine exactly. Desk was fine, monitor was 15 cm too low when standing, and I'd have spent a fortnight adjusting the wrong variable.
I did the thing where you set the calculator number, save it as preset one, and then never question it because a website said so. A year of mild wrist ache later I moved it two centimetres in an idle moment and it stopped within a few days. The calculator wasn't wrong exactly — it just had no idea about my keyboard, my chair or the fact that I wear boots half the year.
Calculator gets you within a few centimetres. Your elbows and a week of small adjustments get you the rest. Raise the monitor when you stand.
@mobility_moss · 4mo ago
They're population averages of limb proportions applied to your total height, and proportions vary a lot — two people at 5'11" can have four or five centimetres of difference in elbow height depending on whether their length is in the legs or the torso. So treat the output as a starting point with about three centimetres of slop either way, set it there, and then adjust in one centimetre steps over a week rather than deciding on day one. Mine ended up four centimetres above what the calculator said and I'd never have found that by recalculating.
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